I hope that you are not too hard on yourself for whatever you find lacking in the original piece, or for any critiques inspired by this one. Megan Stielstra wrote once that "to essay" means only "to attempt," and we're all better for having access to these tools for speaking about gender and being able to continue to refine them. I look forward to seeing what emerges from this work, which has already enriched my own writing & understanding so much. I hope to see writers (including yourself) tackle how racialization interacts with all of this, want to explore the ways in which these dynamics are contextual and mutable a bit more, and think I'll probably have a fair amount more to say about how the boundaries of manhood are policed for queer men, too. Thank you for writing this!!
really appreciate the rehash of the previous iteration of this theory. this is generally a lot easier for me to follow along. i really dig the comparisons of gender to class, or rather gender as a class, and subaltern being the necessary underclass, like how capitalism requires an unemployed populous to function, in order to threaten the working class. there are of course bones i have to pick with some things, like the qualifications of who gets put into subaltern, but i think talia bhatt's "understanding transmisogyny, part four: penetrability" fills in some of the blanks there. reading her work in tandem with yours gives me a great avenue to finally put words to what i see and feel about this whole gender thing. keep it up!
how honored am I to have even been a little bit part of the conversations that happened to make this essay real. you continue to put into words what I know but fail to describe myself - and I am so grateful for it! I can't wait to see what comes next.
oops, forgot this is my throwaway account. it's eight!
Not all of this strikes a chord in me as reflecting an intuitive understanding, but the parts that ring true resonate powerfully. This makes visceral sense in a way that Bodies That Matter gets at in a disatisftingly empty way. There is mass, momentum in this perspective. I particularly appreciate the reproductive force that is sustained by what we might feel is subversive. Power is fed by layers of digestive processes; an ecosystem, not a system of ideology that can be simply adjusted in course. Veblen articulates social forces in biological sensibility in a way that feels akin to this work.
I was excited to read this. I’m glad to see you’ve expanded and refined your theory, and I hope in the spirit of discourse you appreciate less polished critique from a very different terrain of analysis. The expansion adds some interesting insights at the level of relational positioning, although I believe the same core issues remain. To put it plainly, the ontological map you propose isn’t appropriate, as you’re ascribing legibility to a scattered, increasingly distorted field, straddling both the symbolic and material realities of gender in a way I’m compelled to problematize and ramble on about tirelessly. Because what we’re dealing with is not only material struggle but the product of capital’s semiotic hegemony. Gender is organized around a singular subject-form, a hegemonic “I,” and the collapsed or distorted subjectivities that gather around it. The system does not simply produce distinct classes, it produces visibility, recognition, formatting. Subalternization is not just a punishment as you emphasize, nor is it defined by invisibility or illegibility as I think you imply. What defines it, if anything, is its hyperlegibility and punishment as failure, in contradiction with its condition as a visible content category. She is folded into a different kind of production entirely, distinct from the Not Power: the production of symbolic surplus. Gender functions not only as a class system, but as a sign system or semiotic field. It produces surplus labor and symbolic excess at the same time. The woman as void, the theyfab as glitch, the faggot as caricature: They mark the exhaustion of gender’s symbolic economy, which has begun to recurse, break down, and consume itself. This kind of collapse mirrors what happens when the superstructure can no longer meaningfully map onto the base. Gramsci called this a crisis of hegemony: when ideology fails to explain the conditions of life, and symbolic authority begins to unravel. Gender is in such a state of crisis. Transfeminine life doesn’t merely symbolize this contradiction, the tranny exposes it. The tranny IS the contradiction, and she is formatted into spectacle, because capital doesn’t erase symbolic failure. It monetizes it. The transfeminine isn’t hidden, she’s fed into TikTok, fashion, Twitter discourse, IKEA sharks. “Shemale” becomes both slur and porn category. She is actually made hypervisible, not as a subject or just as a warning, but as entertainment and a consumer category. And this is the precondition by which liberalism markets gendered tolerance, visibility, exploration, and so-called autonomy. This is the trans feminine ontology: a crisis managed through aesthetics, not being excluded from the gender economy but being excessively folded into it. That is what makes the queer positioning unique and distinct. In this view, I continue to suspect this isn’t a ternary system, compelling as that seems, but a monadic one (though I admit to disagreeing with you fundamentally about what gender ontologically is here.) To reiterate a critique I made before, there is one sovereign subject-form that defines the semiotic field of gender. The supposed “three” positions are not equally constituted gender-classes but are relational distortions, failures, or reactions to that central gendered subject. What appears as a ternary is, in fact, a unified symbolic machine, a singular symbolic recursion organized around a lone sovereign subject: a Monogender. Not “man” in the biological sense, but abstract Man-as-subject, the one who names, acts, formats, and owns, and the one through whom coherence, recognition, and desire are distributed. Everyone else is positioned in relation to him: as object, as failure, as symbolic residue. Power is just proximity to this subject. Not-Power is tolerable otherness, what he comfortably owns and regulates. Subaltern is the system’s collapsed output, glitch, spectacle, and the expulsion formatted as content. What we are left with is not a grid of three genders or genders-as-classes. It is a bourgeois, monogendered field with orbiting distortions, the scattered breakdowns of gender’s semiotic order altogether.
> Rather, it feels more like a “remake” to me than a direct sequel – a “Rebuild of Evangelion” more than it is an “Iron Man 2.”
Genuinely made me chuckle. This is minor in the grand scheme of things, but I really appreciate the humor you injected into the piece. It's nerdy without being smarmy - a rarity in this day and age - and helps digest the more serious part of the text. It's a show of good craft!
Anyway, this theory is something I think has been desperately needed in queer/gender theory for aaaages. There have been attempts at similar concepts like how I saw some people on tumblr talk about "faggot as a gender" years ago, and even acknowledgement that the already existing frameworks were ill fit to serve us, like how one of tumblr user baeddel's retrospectives on the clique of the same name mentioned that they felt like they had to fit their theory into a "privilege-oppression" framework even while realizing the framework was insufficiency, but this is the first time I've seen it laid out in a longform text rather than just mentioned off-hand in a tumblr post. I think this lack is a contributing factor to what people deem "trans infighting". The main culprit is the transmisogyny, obviously, but it seems to me that even when different groups of trans people are actually trying to have good faith discussion, there's an invisible barrier preventing us from truly reaching each other. We're always trying to prove we're "really" whatever gender say we are by pointing out how alike we are to our cis counterparts, but the actual transness, the liminality of gender within which many of us operate, is forced to go unacknowledged, lest anyone get the ides trans women/men are "actually" men/women respectively, and it stifles us! Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but sometimes it feels like it's by design TBH!
I'm curious BTW, since you have some experience with plurality/systemhood, what do you think about how that experience intersects with gender? I know it's a bit beyond the scope of this article, but as someone who recently realized they're plural, I often wonder about this. It's quite common for systems to have a variety of genders among their members - it's certainly true for ours - and I always take cues from them about how they want to be referred as, but I struggle to even conceptualize how this fits into the wider structure of gender. Well, the easy answer is that it doesn't and this is due to ableism in society preventing us from even being fully acknowledged as existing beings lol, but surely not every system or even individual alter is part od the subaltern class, right? It just feels far too simplistic!
“surely not every system or even individual alter is part of the subaltern class, right?” I think this is such an interesting question! I’m a fan of the original gender ternary piece and also loved this update, but it’s still possible I’m misunderstanding, so bear with me. When the term faggotization was used in the original piece, I remember the author making effort to point out that the class one finds oneself in is imposed from the larger social system, and therefore must be legible to power, not to oneself. That when thinking about locating gender class, a possible heuristic might be to imagine how the most bigoted dude at a bar might categorize you. So does power interact with you differently based on the presenting alter? (Pardon if my terminology is incorrect— I know two systems but I’m new to the concept) Are you Subalternized by power? Can you access Not Power? Can you access Power? How does power that consistently interacts with different alters categorize you? Anyone reading, are these questions along the right lines or am I missing something?
The original was extremely enlightening to me and when paired with this does a really good job of explaining both what these ideas are and why they are so important.
I do feel with writing this theoretical and in conversation with other works really lacks references. Especially in areas like the material base where you defer to the work of others to make the case.
I will need to reread this a few times before I can really truly have a real response to this article, but for now I will say this:
I had to stop reading at multiple points to run in a circle and lay on my bed before continuing because this is such an improvement at explaining and clarifying the concepts that you had originally stated in the old article, and additionally, (im not sure if i mentioned this before) i feel a little less anxious about how well I had explained the concepts of this article to the socialist group I am in.
I really do earnestly hope that this article inspires people to start engaging with marxist and marxist leninist political theory and gets used to further the work towards gender abolition and revolution.
But even if it doesn't/didn't (though you kind of already did, personally your original article did inspire me to start reading political theory!) this article was worth making to provide some clarity to the struggles people - all of us - live under.
This piece in concert with the last one have been great reads, and revelatory for our understanding of the gender class system. Made us really happy to see this show up in our inbox :) We’ve been reading these pieces to folk in our community and it’s been connecting viscerally. Y’all are incredibly captivating writers, I look forward eagerly to whatever y’all touch next :)
I will return to this and read it more in-depth later -- I'm at work right now, oops -- but I hope it is okay if I reference this/build upon it as I'm working on my own things related to gay trans men. I am always excited by explicitly Marxist analyses of gender, so I am happy to see that you built further upon your previous essay.
I think I see two fundamental problems with this, but I do see it as a workable framework. First off I think it’s a massive mistake to use the term gender to describe power, non-power and subaltern. Fundamentally because this is using the word gender in a manner so alien from how the term gender is generally understood to be used to the point of requiring a new term to describe the concept that is being discussed. If someone came up to me or any other trans women and said “your gender is fundamentally different from that of cis women” I’d rightfully tell them to fuck off. Instead i think a much more useful and meaningful term is gender class, if someone told me, “by being a trans women you’re afforded different treatment and are marginalized much more harshly in comparison to the average cis women,” id then agree with them.
Further more I think there needs to be some sort of framework for sub classes within the three gender classes. While this article rightly points out that trans men depending on many factors most outside of their control can be either subaltern, non power or even very occasionally power, a subaltern trans man will still be able to hold patriarchal power over a subaltern trans women and there will still be contradictions between subaltern trans men and subaltern trans women. This framework needs to make more room for the nuances within the three gender classes. A subaltern trans man still isn’t a tranny in the eyes of the patriarchy.
Moving on from criticisms and briefly lamenting that it’s takes less time to gush about all I love in this than what I have problems with. This is genuinely excellent and very needed. Many of these ideas are ideas that me and other trans women I’ve spoken to on transfeminist issues have come up with independently from you. It was genuinely an amazing experience to put many of my experiences into words in a way I never was able too. Genuinely, thank you for this.
"a subaltern trans man will still be able to hold patriarchal power over a subaltern trans women"
I think you might be confusing Subaltern with Power. Subalternization is subalternization. If a trans man and a trans women both experience a hate crime, for example, could you really say one had it better than the other, purely on that grounds? Wielding patriarchal power as a trans man is an appeal to join Power (or at least Not Power) by scapegoating women and taking advantage of transmisogyny as a social force. In that way, trans men have much more access to escaping Subaltern status than trans women. Which is the gist of what you're saying, right? Trans men have it better than trans women due to the patriarchy; which is true. This theory is attempting to explain *how* it's true though, which I don't think goes against what you said. The contradiction is still between P/NP and SA.
“your gender is fundamentally different from that of cis women”
I think this depends on which gender you mean. If you understand gender as 'trans women=subaltern, cis women=not power' then what you said is true. But that is not what Sizhen is saying. Cis women who don't adequately perform Femininity (shaving, wearing makeup, taking all social abuse with a smile, etc) can be Subaltern (although decades of cis feminism have given them much more upward mobility into Power and some protection from being subalternized that trans women are still absolutely not afforded). And trans women who do perform femininity to cis standards, or throw other trans women under the bus, can be Not Power (even if only precariously). So you *can* have the same gender as a cis woman. It's not 'cis women' and 'trans women' that are fundamentally different, but Not Power and Subaltern.
To the first part I kinna get what you’re saying but also I don’t necessarily think that’s came across super well in the article itself.
As for the second part you miss understand my argument. Everything you said was right however what I was really arguing is that the word gender shouldn’t be used for power non power and subaltern and a different term entirely should be used as to avoid confusion. I suggest gender class.
I hope that you are not too hard on yourself for whatever you find lacking in the original piece, or for any critiques inspired by this one. Megan Stielstra wrote once that "to essay" means only "to attempt," and we're all better for having access to these tools for speaking about gender and being able to continue to refine them. I look forward to seeing what emerges from this work, which has already enriched my own writing & understanding so much. I hope to see writers (including yourself) tackle how racialization interacts with all of this, want to explore the ways in which these dynamics are contextual and mutable a bit more, and think I'll probably have a fair amount more to say about how the boundaries of manhood are policed for queer men, too. Thank you for writing this!!
Thank you so much for your encouraging words! I appreciate it dearly.
really appreciate the rehash of the previous iteration of this theory. this is generally a lot easier for me to follow along. i really dig the comparisons of gender to class, or rather gender as a class, and subaltern being the necessary underclass, like how capitalism requires an unemployed populous to function, in order to threaten the working class. there are of course bones i have to pick with some things, like the qualifications of who gets put into subaltern, but i think talia bhatt's "understanding transmisogyny, part four: penetrability" fills in some of the blanks there. reading her work in tandem with yours gives me a great avenue to finally put words to what i see and feel about this whole gender thing. keep it up!
how honored am I to have even been a little bit part of the conversations that happened to make this essay real. you continue to put into words what I know but fail to describe myself - and I am so grateful for it! I can't wait to see what comes next.
oops, forgot this is my throwaway account. it's eight!
Not all of this strikes a chord in me as reflecting an intuitive understanding, but the parts that ring true resonate powerfully. This makes visceral sense in a way that Bodies That Matter gets at in a disatisftingly empty way. There is mass, momentum in this perspective. I particularly appreciate the reproductive force that is sustained by what we might feel is subversive. Power is fed by layers of digestive processes; an ecosystem, not a system of ideology that can be simply adjusted in course. Veblen articulates social forces in biological sensibility in a way that feels akin to this work.
I was excited to read this. I’m glad to see you’ve expanded and refined your theory, and I hope in the spirit of discourse you appreciate less polished critique from a very different terrain of analysis. The expansion adds some interesting insights at the level of relational positioning, although I believe the same core issues remain. To put it plainly, the ontological map you propose isn’t appropriate, as you’re ascribing legibility to a scattered, increasingly distorted field, straddling both the symbolic and material realities of gender in a way I’m compelled to problematize and ramble on about tirelessly. Because what we’re dealing with is not only material struggle but the product of capital’s semiotic hegemony. Gender is organized around a singular subject-form, a hegemonic “I,” and the collapsed or distorted subjectivities that gather around it. The system does not simply produce distinct classes, it produces visibility, recognition, formatting. Subalternization is not just a punishment as you emphasize, nor is it defined by invisibility or illegibility as I think you imply. What defines it, if anything, is its hyperlegibility and punishment as failure, in contradiction with its condition as a visible content category. She is folded into a different kind of production entirely, distinct from the Not Power: the production of symbolic surplus. Gender functions not only as a class system, but as a sign system or semiotic field. It produces surplus labor and symbolic excess at the same time. The woman as void, the theyfab as glitch, the faggot as caricature: They mark the exhaustion of gender’s symbolic economy, which has begun to recurse, break down, and consume itself. This kind of collapse mirrors what happens when the superstructure can no longer meaningfully map onto the base. Gramsci called this a crisis of hegemony: when ideology fails to explain the conditions of life, and symbolic authority begins to unravel. Gender is in such a state of crisis. Transfeminine life doesn’t merely symbolize this contradiction, the tranny exposes it. The tranny IS the contradiction, and she is formatted into spectacle, because capital doesn’t erase symbolic failure. It monetizes it. The transfeminine isn’t hidden, she’s fed into TikTok, fashion, Twitter discourse, IKEA sharks. “Shemale” becomes both slur and porn category. She is actually made hypervisible, not as a subject or just as a warning, but as entertainment and a consumer category. And this is the precondition by which liberalism markets gendered tolerance, visibility, exploration, and so-called autonomy. This is the trans feminine ontology: a crisis managed through aesthetics, not being excluded from the gender economy but being excessively folded into it. That is what makes the queer positioning unique and distinct. In this view, I continue to suspect this isn’t a ternary system, compelling as that seems, but a monadic one (though I admit to disagreeing with you fundamentally about what gender ontologically is here.) To reiterate a critique I made before, there is one sovereign subject-form that defines the semiotic field of gender. The supposed “three” positions are not equally constituted gender-classes but are relational distortions, failures, or reactions to that central gendered subject. What appears as a ternary is, in fact, a unified symbolic machine, a singular symbolic recursion organized around a lone sovereign subject: a Monogender. Not “man” in the biological sense, but abstract Man-as-subject, the one who names, acts, formats, and owns, and the one through whom coherence, recognition, and desire are distributed. Everyone else is positioned in relation to him: as object, as failure, as symbolic residue. Power is just proximity to this subject. Not-Power is tolerable otherness, what he comfortably owns and regulates. Subaltern is the system’s collapsed output, glitch, spectacle, and the expulsion formatted as content. What we are left with is not a grid of three genders or genders-as-classes. It is a bourgeois, monogendered field with orbiting distortions, the scattered breakdowns of gender’s semiotic order altogether.
> Rather, it feels more like a “remake” to me than a direct sequel – a “Rebuild of Evangelion” more than it is an “Iron Man 2.”
Genuinely made me chuckle. This is minor in the grand scheme of things, but I really appreciate the humor you injected into the piece. It's nerdy without being smarmy - a rarity in this day and age - and helps digest the more serious part of the text. It's a show of good craft!
Anyway, this theory is something I think has been desperately needed in queer/gender theory for aaaages. There have been attempts at similar concepts like how I saw some people on tumblr talk about "faggot as a gender" years ago, and even acknowledgement that the already existing frameworks were ill fit to serve us, like how one of tumblr user baeddel's retrospectives on the clique of the same name mentioned that they felt like they had to fit their theory into a "privilege-oppression" framework even while realizing the framework was insufficiency, but this is the first time I've seen it laid out in a longform text rather than just mentioned off-hand in a tumblr post. I think this lack is a contributing factor to what people deem "trans infighting". The main culprit is the transmisogyny, obviously, but it seems to me that even when different groups of trans people are actually trying to have good faith discussion, there's an invisible barrier preventing us from truly reaching each other. We're always trying to prove we're "really" whatever gender say we are by pointing out how alike we are to our cis counterparts, but the actual transness, the liminality of gender within which many of us operate, is forced to go unacknowledged, lest anyone get the ides trans women/men are "actually" men/women respectively, and it stifles us! Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but sometimes it feels like it's by design TBH!
I'm curious BTW, since you have some experience with plurality/systemhood, what do you think about how that experience intersects with gender? I know it's a bit beyond the scope of this article, but as someone who recently realized they're plural, I often wonder about this. It's quite common for systems to have a variety of genders among their members - it's certainly true for ours - and I always take cues from them about how they want to be referred as, but I struggle to even conceptualize how this fits into the wider structure of gender. Well, the easy answer is that it doesn't and this is due to ableism in society preventing us from even being fully acknowledged as existing beings lol, but surely not every system or even individual alter is part od the subaltern class, right? It just feels far too simplistic!
“surely not every system or even individual alter is part of the subaltern class, right?” I think this is such an interesting question! I’m a fan of the original gender ternary piece and also loved this update, but it’s still possible I’m misunderstanding, so bear with me. When the term faggotization was used in the original piece, I remember the author making effort to point out that the class one finds oneself in is imposed from the larger social system, and therefore must be legible to power, not to oneself. That when thinking about locating gender class, a possible heuristic might be to imagine how the most bigoted dude at a bar might categorize you. So does power interact with you differently based on the presenting alter? (Pardon if my terminology is incorrect— I know two systems but I’m new to the concept) Are you Subalternized by power? Can you access Not Power? Can you access Power? How does power that consistently interacts with different alters categorize you? Anyone reading, are these questions along the right lines or am I missing something?
The original was extremely enlightening to me and when paired with this does a really good job of explaining both what these ideas are and why they are so important.
I do feel with writing this theoretical and in conversation with other works really lacks references. Especially in areas like the material base where you defer to the work of others to make the case.
Holyyy fucking shit reading this made my brain cum and orgasm every fucking sentence holy shit holy shit Fuck
[Note - this is King]
I will need to reread this a few times before I can really truly have a real response to this article, but for now I will say this:
I had to stop reading at multiple points to run in a circle and lay on my bed before continuing because this is such an improvement at explaining and clarifying the concepts that you had originally stated in the old article, and additionally, (im not sure if i mentioned this before) i feel a little less anxious about how well I had explained the concepts of this article to the socialist group I am in.
I really do earnestly hope that this article inspires people to start engaging with marxist and marxist leninist political theory and gets used to further the work towards gender abolition and revolution.
But even if it doesn't/didn't (though you kind of already did, personally your original article did inspire me to start reading political theory!) this article was worth making to provide some clarity to the struggles people - all of us - live under.
This piece in concert with the last one have been great reads, and revelatory for our understanding of the gender class system. Made us really happy to see this show up in our inbox :) We’ve been reading these pieces to folk in our community and it’s been connecting viscerally. Y’all are incredibly captivating writers, I look forward eagerly to whatever y’all touch next :)
I will return to this and read it more in-depth later -- I'm at work right now, oops -- but I hope it is okay if I reference this/build upon it as I'm working on my own things related to gay trans men. I am always excited by explicitly Marxist analyses of gender, so I am happy to see that you built further upon your previous essay.
I think I see two fundamental problems with this, but I do see it as a workable framework. First off I think it’s a massive mistake to use the term gender to describe power, non-power and subaltern. Fundamentally because this is using the word gender in a manner so alien from how the term gender is generally understood to be used to the point of requiring a new term to describe the concept that is being discussed. If someone came up to me or any other trans women and said “your gender is fundamentally different from that of cis women” I’d rightfully tell them to fuck off. Instead i think a much more useful and meaningful term is gender class, if someone told me, “by being a trans women you’re afforded different treatment and are marginalized much more harshly in comparison to the average cis women,” id then agree with them.
Further more I think there needs to be some sort of framework for sub classes within the three gender classes. While this article rightly points out that trans men depending on many factors most outside of their control can be either subaltern, non power or even very occasionally power, a subaltern trans man will still be able to hold patriarchal power over a subaltern trans women and there will still be contradictions between subaltern trans men and subaltern trans women. This framework needs to make more room for the nuances within the three gender classes. A subaltern trans man still isn’t a tranny in the eyes of the patriarchy.
Moving on from criticisms and briefly lamenting that it’s takes less time to gush about all I love in this than what I have problems with. This is genuinely excellent and very needed. Many of these ideas are ideas that me and other trans women I’ve spoken to on transfeminist issues have come up with independently from you. It was genuinely an amazing experience to put many of my experiences into words in a way I never was able too. Genuinely, thank you for this.
"a subaltern trans man will still be able to hold patriarchal power over a subaltern trans women"
I think you might be confusing Subaltern with Power. Subalternization is subalternization. If a trans man and a trans women both experience a hate crime, for example, could you really say one had it better than the other, purely on that grounds? Wielding patriarchal power as a trans man is an appeal to join Power (or at least Not Power) by scapegoating women and taking advantage of transmisogyny as a social force. In that way, trans men have much more access to escaping Subaltern status than trans women. Which is the gist of what you're saying, right? Trans men have it better than trans women due to the patriarchy; which is true. This theory is attempting to explain *how* it's true though, which I don't think goes against what you said. The contradiction is still between P/NP and SA.
“your gender is fundamentally different from that of cis women”
I think this depends on which gender you mean. If you understand gender as 'trans women=subaltern, cis women=not power' then what you said is true. But that is not what Sizhen is saying. Cis women who don't adequately perform Femininity (shaving, wearing makeup, taking all social abuse with a smile, etc) can be Subaltern (although decades of cis feminism have given them much more upward mobility into Power and some protection from being subalternized that trans women are still absolutely not afforded). And trans women who do perform femininity to cis standards, or throw other trans women under the bus, can be Not Power (even if only precariously). So you *can* have the same gender as a cis woman. It's not 'cis women' and 'trans women' that are fundamentally different, but Not Power and Subaltern.
To the first part I kinna get what you’re saying but also I don’t necessarily think that’s came across super well in the article itself.
As for the second part you miss understand my argument. Everything you said was right however what I was really arguing is that the word gender shouldn’t be used for power non power and subaltern and a different term entirely should be used as to avoid confusion. I suggest gender class.